WoW – More fun together!

Where’s my weekend to recover from my weekend?

Start the weekend with a 25 man raid on ICC on Friday night with the guild. End it 48 hours later in a ten man. In between?

I had one weekend goal: to get my various collection of badges and stone keeper’s shards turned into heirlooms before the patch hit and the cost was prohibitive. Problem 1: I don’t know what my worgen is going to be. Goblin will be a shaman, but worgen? No idea.

Problem 2: turning in my stone keeper shards (over 500 on each of my two characters) requires us to win Wintergrasp. Which isn’t something you can count on….

Saturday morning Reversion wakes me up to tell me we own WG for the next 12 minutes so I should get it done now. I hop out of bed, grab the mage, buy some shoulders, grab the tree, buy the rest of the shoulders and the caster staff. I’m pretty sure whatever I roll will be a caster, so I decide to get the cloth, leather, and mail caster gear. Ok, so if I roll a hunter I’ll be sorry, but maybe I’ll keep that for later in the expansion.

That done, I decide to stick around and help defend WG. I guess the Horde were sleeping in, because we knocked down the southern towers, defended against both pushes the made, and kept the keep. Ok! So let’s grind enough badges to get the chest pieces to go with the shoulders. I needed about 40….

Reversion tanked, we grabbed some guildies, and were off on a whirlwind grinding session. Wheee! I got most of the way to my goal before time to go get our traditional Saturday burrito lunch. Came back, joined with the guild to run the weekly raid – XT needed to die, and we were just the ones to do it.

Those raids are so fun with a vent full of cheerful people. I drove a demolisher (working toward the win-in-all-three-vehicles achievement) and we skipped from FL to XT. On the way to XT, I made too enthusiastic a gesture and my mouse flew off my desk and hit the floor. Hard. I picked it up. The cursor moved… but the buttons weren’t clicking any more.

I scrounged around and with Reversion’s help, got an old wired mouse plugged in before the pull. Ugh! Good thing I was healing easy content, because with no side buttons I was having to target and use keys to throw anything besides Rejuv. I’ve gotten so used to click casting….

So after XT died, I told Reversion we were going to Best Buy and we piled in the van for the trip. It’s a good half hour’s drive – along the coast, with the ocean on one side and the bright blue sky overhead and the windows down. Worth the trip just for the driving.

And there we were at Best Buy, staring at gaming input devices. Mice, keyboards, keypads, weird combo items… I’m drooling over the Naga and the WoW gaming mouse, but I know they’re useless to me. You see, they’re right handed. So am I – but I mouse exclusively left handed. (Don’t ask). I need an ambidextrous mouse.

Turns out there is such a thing. I pull the SteelSeries Xai out of the box (don’t tell! I felt guilty doing it) and fell in love almost at once. A little large for my hand but not unworkable. Two buttons on each side. The best feeling mouse I’ve ever set hands on…. mmm.

Reversion meanwhile was looking over mice too. He decided to try the WoW branded gaming mouse (he ended up taking it back and going with a different one for reasons I’ll let him explain himself). And then we stared at the keyboards…

They had a handful of “gaming” keyboards. One was just a normal keyboard but with glowing lights and a funky shape. But the Logitech one actually looked…. cool. There’s a bank of 18 keys (three groups of two rows of three keys) on the left, and you switch them between three modes to toggle different modes. We could see some immediate applications… and the little led screen at the top looked cool…

Long story short, we walked out of Best Buy with a new keyboard and mouse for each of us. We spent the trip back discussing how we’d set things up. Then we were really really good and did our yardwork :) while our new toys sat inside for us.

And then it was playtime! We’re planning a real in-depth post on it later, but basically we used Bartender to make the keybindings work. Now I can have my healing and utility spells in one bank; press the mode key and grab the buff/out of combat stuff spells.

I had to do a screwy work-around to get two of the buttons on my mouse to work right. I love this mouse, but unlike most smart mice it doesn’t have enough key-click options. Two of the mouse buttons are mapped to “tilt right” and “tilt left” which didn’t seem to do anything that I could read. So I mapped those buttons to F11 and F12 and then had those keys trigger mouseover macros for the spells I wanted. Result, the clicks work the way I want to and I can just hang my mouse over the Vuhdo frame and do anything I want.

Fast forward to Sunday afternoon. Church over, it’s time for some laziness before the evening 10 man. Only I signed on and immediately got asked to a TOC25. What the heck, sure. Pop in, beasts are dead, so we start on Jaraxxus. Get him done, get Faction Champs. Time for times. The raid leader is explaining the fight for those who don’t know or can’t remember, and there’s a few of those. Doing a good job of explaining to – and then a hunter pulls. Argh. We pick it up, we fight, a few people die, we get it under control and they drop. Loot gets handed out. The hunter who started the pull dc’s. Apparently he wanted the trinket, didn’t get it, and so was done. We make a try at Anub, bleeding puggers, and break up. It happens.

6 o’clock and time for the ten man. I’m excited. Analogue and Approximate (Reversion’s hunter) have been invited to an excellent ten man group that the guild runs. We’ve got an hour to get as far as we can before most of the raid goes to a 25 man continuation of a different guild’s run. We’ll do more Monday night. We get in, get pulling, and clear the first wing in 45 minutes. We thank them for the invite and go to make dinner. Reversion is playing Final Fantasy with the baby while I cook, when I hear voices in Vent in the next room. “Looks like they’re afk,” says the raid leader. I run back and there’s an invite on our screens. I accept and ask what’s going on. The 25 man didn’t happen so we’re getting back together.

8 o’clock, baby in bed and food eaten, we start again. We do Rotface on heroic – my first one that wasn’t lootship! We wiped once but it was fun. Other than making my fingers hurt from all the healing, it wasn’t too bad at all. We do Festergut normal since the weekly quest was Fester/Rot, and then try Putricide on heroic twice before swapping back to normal and downing him.

Oh yeah- so we started Saurfang before we switched the difficulty back to normal, accidentally, and while we did switch the difficulty, he started with 100% blood power. So we did that whole fight with one mark out. Don’t try this at home, kiddies.

Anyhow. We were at quitting time but we decided to continue and knock out the blood wing. I hate the Princes fight. It’s just so much running around, trying to heal, trying to find the people who need heals… but they died. And so did the Queen, although we wiped on her the first time.

Tonight we’re going in, killing some dragons, and taking a long, hard look at Arthas. This group has all mostly killed him before and we’re thrilled to get the chance to try, alongside them. We transferred servers and guilds hoping for a chance to down Arthas before the expansion is over. It would make me really happy to do it tonight, the last time I can be a tree for the whole fight…

Ohhh the Xai! I do so want to try that mouse, as it looks lovely, but I’m very reluctant to buy it without holding it first, as I’m a bit worried the thumb buttons will be too easy to press accidentally. I have a Logitech G5 v2 at the moment and while it’s nice, it has an annoying ridge along the right side where my 3rd finger goes, and it can get a bit uncomfortable. If that ridge wasn’t there it’d be almost perfect (the scroll wheel isn’t that nice either – too narrow, no ridges, and because it tilts side to side it’s kinda hard to just click straight down).

It was $20 off at Best Buy this weekend. And I haven’t pressed the thumb buttons accidentally at all – you need enough pressure to set them off, yet I can press the ones on the other side with my pinky knuckle. Works really well for my slightly-small hands. No ridges. Feels soft, but the clicks are crisp. I highly recommend it – other than the fact that it’s not as easy to customize the button presses as apparently some are. Still I have got it working really well for me.

Also – open the box up, if it’s the same wrapping we had it goes back in ok and if you’re pretty sure you’re going to buy it I wouldn’t feel too bad ;-p

I don’t mind so much about the customisation – I won’t even be using it for gaming as much as I used to, and I’m running Ubuntu so I dunno what the driver situation is there. It recognised my G5 just fine and the two thumb buttons work as expected in Chrome (back/forwards).

Ah, well, the software won’t work, most likely, since it is Windows only, but it has certain settings you can configure with an LED panel on the bottom of the mouse. Still I’m not sure you’d get your moneys worth out of it on Ubuntu, unless someone has written third party software to make that work (and knowing the Linux community, that might be the case). But I wouldn’t buy this mouse if you didn’t think you’d be able to configure it on your machine.

Drivers are a different question, and they probably work, but may be out of date….

Well so long as it’s comfortably and I can adjust the important settings (acceleration, button assignments (really just to see if I can find a use for the right-side buttons)) using the LCD I won’t mind. I want a quality mouse, and I might one day get my Windows 7 install (containing my WoW stuff) working again!

Weird, the Deathadder was going to be my second choice :) It’s not so much the cost that bothers me – I’ve already wasted about £40 on a Logitech MX620 which was really comfortable but the wireless was awful, then I spent £40 on a Razer Copperhead which I hated (it must be designed for people with really thin fingers or something), and then a Logitech MX518 which I didn’t mind but gave to my girlfriend when I bought the G5.

Incidentally I also have a Razer eXactMat and it’s realllly nice, if a little large. The G5 glides over the “control” side wonderfully.

The death adder has bee really nice so far. Took me a while to get the speed set right but I am picky. It only has a mouse wheel click and not the tilt AND click. So that way you can easily click it without tilting instead.